1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a test system; in particular, to a boot test system and method thereof for cold boot test executed by a computer.
2. Description of Related Art
For manufacturers of computer system, quality of computer delivered from factory is under strict control, and it is necessary to perform a series of tests before delivery, so as to assure the stability and reliability of quality. Among these tests, one of them is about cold boot test operations, whose method is to repeatedly execute actions of power on and power off once in a certain time interval, testing whether the computer booting is operable; for example, if a computer is able to boot to start the operating system, then it is considered as a normal boot.
Referring now to FIG. 1, a diagram of prior art computer boot test is shown, wherein the tester 8 is used to perform cold boot on the target computer 9. The tester 8 and the target computer 9 are linked with signal transmission lines (not shown), allowing the tester 8 to output power control signals to repeatedly perform boot test on the target computer 9, and inside the target computer 9 there installs a counter program to count the number of successful boots that the current target computer 9 has executed.
Hence, when the tester 8 starts to perform cold boot test on the target computer 9, the tester 8 incessantly performs reboot test on the target computer 9 in a plurality of times; meanwhile, the counter program inside the target computer 9 also automatically accumulates the current number of successful boots. Therefore, upon completion of all number of boot tests applied on the target computer 9 by the tester 8, an operator may read the count finally accumulated in the counter program inside the target computer 9, and determine whether the boot function of the current target computer 9 is stable based on the acquired count. For instance, in case that the tester 8 performs 100 times of reboot tests on the target computer 9, but the accumulated count in the counter program is less than 100 and exceeds by a certain amount, then it can be determined that the said target computer 9 provides poor boot stability, and the operator needs to perform relevant hardware debug works on the target computer 9, so as to assure the product quality of the target computer 9.
However, the aforesaid approach of computer cold boot test relies on professional testers, and, during the test, suppose the target computer is not able to boot normally, the current error conditions can not be retained, but restarted during the next reboot test. As a result, the above-mentioned issues need to be addressed.